Whatever the Circumstances (Acts 16:11-40, Jeff Kliewer)

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Acts - Empowered: Whatever the Circumstances (Acts 16:11-40) Pastor Jeff Kliewer  September 16, 2018

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Not all contentment is created equal. Not all contentment is created equal.
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Some contentment is the kind that a father might disdain. The contentment of a son who is expected to get a job and to grow up and to move out might become the bane of the father's existence.
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A little less contentment would do in that case. But some contentment is great gain.
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Godly contentment, according to the Scripture, is great gain. When we let go of the things of this earth and find ourselves content in the spiritual things, in the things of God, to the point where we would let go of all distractions, that is a good thing.
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One of the great miracles of the history of the Church is that African -Americans in America, to a large degree, accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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Many of them found themselves either born into slavery or brought across from Africa, and yet able to believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ in a circumstance which was wicked and evil and racist and horrible, yet in God's gracious plan, he opened the hearts of many to believe.
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One of the great heroes of the Christian faith is a man named George Lyell. He was born a slave, and yet, content in Christ, he preached the gospel and continued to go forward preaching the message of Jesus Christ until, according to the
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Scriptures, he was able to gain his freedom, and he did so. After gaining his freedom, he went to Jamaica and preached the gospel there.
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He baptized over 500 people in Jamaica. And the Christian religion was established in large part because of his work.
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Over 20 ,000 believers, by the end of his lifetime, had joined the churches that he was a part of founding.
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His name was George Lyell. Another great and inspiring figure that we all have probably heard of is
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Corrie ten Boom. Suffering at the hands of the Nazis, she was taken into a concentration camp and yet would not deny the faith.
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She clung to the Lord Jesus Christ. Even in a circumstance that horrendous, she continued to believe, content with her
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Savior. Johnny Erickson Tada, we've heard of. Paralyzed and yet overcoming, still praising in the midst of pain.
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Despite not having a body that works, she learned to paint with her teeth and makes beautiful paintings.
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And she has inspired the lives of millions of Christians by her contentment in Jesus Christ.
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Her mind is set on heavenly things, not earthly. I love the words of Job, who says, though he slay me, yet will
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I praise him. It's easy to praise God and everything's going well, right? But it's much harder in the midst of pain when circumstances are difficult.
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My title today is Whatever the Circumstances. Whatever the
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Circumstances. When Dave, who works here, read that title, he thought I sounded like a mobster in writing that.
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Whatever the circumstances, boss, I'll take care of you. No, it's not that.
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Whatever circumstances befall us, Christ is enough. Grace is enough.
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And today we're gonna see probably the most dramatic picture in the Bible of being content in every circumstance.
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It's Paul, thrown in prison and yet praising in the midst of his pain. The thing to do when you're in difficult, hard circumstances is to begin with praise.
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Let's read about it in the story that leads up to that. Acts chapter 16, verse 11.
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If you don't have a Bible, we have some in the back, but then you can also just look it up on your phone. Real quick, you put in Acts 16 here.
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Your phone will pull that up. We're using the ESV version. Acts 16, verse 11 and follow along.
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You'll do better if you follow along. And hey, I prefer if you actually bring the hard copy of the
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Bible. Carry that with you, and that way you can take notes and margins, you can undermine things, circle things, and you can have it for a legacy.
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One of the things I love is to go back and see old Bibles. I collect Bibles. I have a
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Bible from Turkey, I have an Arabic Bible, but the greatest thing is to see my grandfather's
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Bible. He was a preacher. To look and see, what did he write in the margins of this? One day
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I wanna leave behind a lot of Bibles for my kids and the grandkids that are filled with notes and highlighted ideas.
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That's a legacy you can leave. Anyway, that's for free. I didn't plan on saying that, just a little extra.
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So let's get into it. Acts 16, 11 and follow along. The first idea we're looking at is that some seasons are actually smooth sailing.
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Give us those, right, Lord Jesus? Lord, we want the smooth sailing. And sometimes He does.
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Check this out, verse 11 to 16. So setting sail from Troas, and we'll bring up a map here.
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Before I go on, I just wanna show where we are in the text. Setting sail from Troas, we made a direct voyage to Samothrace and the following day to Neapolis.
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We're on Paul's second missionary journey. It takes off from Antioch, goes through his native town of Tarsus, in Derbe, Leicester, where he was stoned and left for dead.
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As he goes up through different parts, intending to go to Asia, the Holy Spirit forbids it. He wants to go to Bithynia, and the
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Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to go up here. So they end up just sort of wandering down to Troas, where Paul gets that vision of the
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Macedonian man that says, come over here and help us. So they know it's Jesus, the Spirit of Jesus, sending them on, so they'll go by sea to this island called
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Samothrace. Now this has a rock, almost a mountain. It's 5 ,000 feet tall.
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So it's just right here in the middle of the Aegean Sea. You have an amazing island, and they stop there for one day.
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It takes one day to get here and another day to get there. Now that's interesting, because if you have a wind moving in the opposite direction, as in when they're going another time, it takes five days.
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But here, we learn in the text, verse 11, we made a direct voyage. That means it's a tailwind.
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It's pushing them along. And the following day, so just one day later, they're moving on, and they land here in Neapolis.
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The destination is Philippi, a great Roman city, one of the major cities that the
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Romans built, inhabited by Romans, not Greeks. So this city here is a prominent
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Roman city where they think they can plant the gospel, and it would spread out according to the power of the
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Holy Spirit to spread to different places. So that's where we are. Verse 12, from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the
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District of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city some days, and on the
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Sabbath day, we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we suppose there was a place of prayer.
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And we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together. One who heard us was a woman named
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Lydia from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God.
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The Lord opened her heart, mark that. It takes a miracle of the
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Holy Spirit to bring faith, to bring regeneration. God, in his omnipotent power, opens her heart to believe, to pay attention to what was said by Paul.
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Verse 15, and after she was baptized and her household as well, she urged us, saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the
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Lord, come to my house and stay. And she prevailed upon us. So far in Philippi, things are going well.
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And if everything just went like this all the time, the prosperity preachers that you see on TVN would be right.
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If you have faith, then everything just goes well for you. All things work out.
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In fact, you have financial blessing, and all things work out. But that's not where the story is. So we'll mark that there, and we'll continue.
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But notice, sometimes God knows that you need a season of rest. Psalm 23 says that he leads us by still waters, leads us to green pastures.
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He is a good shepherd. And the Lord knows that you need seasons of rest, seasons of Sabbath in your life.
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That is what Paul is experiencing here, a season of rest, joy.
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Things are smooth sailing. Literally, he had an easy, smooth sailing trip to Philippi.
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But then notice also the ministry. It's just blessed and easy at this particular point.
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He says on a Saturday morning, let's go down to the river. That's a good place.
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People might be praying down by the river, and it's a quiet, serene environment. And sure enough, they go down to pray.
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And some women are there, Lydia, whose profession is to make purple cloth, to dye or dip, where we get baptizo, where she would baptize or dip cloth into the ink and make things purple.
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That's her job, and so she's known for that profession. But she's just down by the river, and Paul addresses her, shares the gospel with her.
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And right away, boom. Easy as that. She believes. She gets baptized, her and her whole family.
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And right away, you have the first converts in Europe. Smooth sailing. Things are going really well.
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And don't you love those seasons in life where you're just in the center of God's will, and you can tell that his hand of blessing is on you?
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That's a real thing. And it's invigorating, too. Have you ever had a
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Lydia in your life? Have you ever been filled with the Spirit, and the Lord leads you to initiate a conversation?
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And you witness to some Lydia, and she gets saved. You recognize that was only the power of God that did it.
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It wasn't you, but it is one of the most encouraging things that can happen to you as a Christian. You'll get just as much out of that experience as the person who gets saved.
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Your faith will be renewed. If you haven't had the experience of leading somebody to Christ in recent months or years,
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I encourage you to come to the Apologetics Conference on September 29. We're going to be training people on how to witness, how to share the gospel, how to initiate that conversation, and then how to persevere in it and help people come to faith.
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It's real easy here, but let's keep reading. It gets harder. Verse 16 and following. Notice here that there is sometimes resistance.
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And spiritual resistance requires spiritual warfare. It's not all smooth sailing.
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Verse 16. As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling.
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She followed Paul and us, crying out, these men are servants of the most high
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God who proclaim to you the way of salvation. I don't know how to do the voice of a demon possessed girl.
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It's probably eerie. It's probably weird. But it's kind of strangely flattering, isn't it?
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She doesn't just oppose them, she proclaims who they actually are. Demonic spirits love to disguise themselves as angels of light.
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And here that's what she had. Verse 18. And this kept doing, she kept doing it for many days.
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Paul, having become greatly annoying, like when your kids keep singing the song that never ends, turned and said to the spirit, it's a different situation in that case, by the way,
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I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her, and it came out, that very hour.
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First thing I want us to see in this particular section is that spiritual forces of evil are real and not to be dabbled with.
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If we know the law of God, Deuteronomy chapter 18, verse 12, calls divination, fortune telling, all manner of sorcery and witchcraft and spiritual occultism, dabbling in those things,
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Deuteronomy 18 .12 says it's an abomination. That word, that Hebrew word, toevah, an abomination, it's reserved for only the most harsh and terrible things that people do.
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We have that in the holiness code, which we did a couple times in Leviticus 18. But here we're told that all forms of witchcraft are toevah, they are an abomination.
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And if something is toevah, if it's an abomination in the sight of God, it is wise and important that we as Christians wash our hands of those things and remain clear of them completely.
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I don't know why, but even the television shows geared to children love to incorporate witchcraft at every turn.
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And the books written for children love to incorporate occultism and sorcery and all manner of divination and spiritism into the themes of those books.
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There's a spiritual reason why that's the case. And we as Christians need to be as wise as serpents, as innocent as doves with regard to all of these things.
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So there are divination and spirits, and notice here that there is a real demon possessing this girl.
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This is not just a case of mental illness, it's not all chemical imbalance, and things gone wrong in the brain, because once Paul deals with the situation, the person is no longer able to give these fortune -telling scripts.
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The demon is driven out. And that tells me that if we're to advance the gospel in the name of Jesus, we need to be prepared and armored up for spiritual war.
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Sometimes it's smooth sailing, but sometimes you have to fight. You have to have a helmet of salvation and a breastplate of righteousness and feet fitted with the gospel of peace, a belt of truth, and take that sword of the
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Spirit and go to war. I remember one time when I was in Kensington, a young man, we prayed over him, and after about 30 minutes of praying, we dismissed everybody from the room and it was just he and I left, and I asked him, what is going on?
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What's wrong? And he began to describe the deep and dark spiritual things that were happening in his mind, even at that very moment.
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As I prayed for him, it probably took another half hour before there was a sense of just complete release.
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I didn't see a spirit, I didn't see a demon, but I knew that we were fighting something real, although unseen, it was real.
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After that young man went home, I went next door to the church where some of the others were gathering, and a young man who didn't know the
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Lord at the time said, hey, when we prayed for that guy, I won't use his name, he said,
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I felt a rush of cold begin in my hand and creep all the way up my arm and just sweep over my body.
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What happened? Now, the Bible says do not be hasty with the laying on of hands, and that can apply to appointing people to certain offices in the church, but I think there might be a tangential application here.
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This young man was not saved, and when we had laid hands on this other guy, he felt cold rush through his body.
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He knew at that time that he needed to be saved. He didn't know what had happened after he left, when that encounter, that spiritual warfare was fought, he wasn't there for that, and yet he experienced that.
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That young man needed to pray to accept the Lord, and he said he did right then. All I'm saying is our culture will tell you that demons are fanciful and unreal, and the stuff of children's storybooks, but as Christians who read the
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Bible, we need to recognize there are real spiritual forces that need to be dealt with with prayer and sometimes fasting, but in all cases, seriousness.
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Not to be dabbled with. Don't let your children play with a Ouija board. Don't let your children mess around with tarot cards.
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Don't walk into one of those fortune tellers, and we have multiple of them right here in Mount Laurel, and in surrounding areas, even to this day.
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It's to -e -va, it's an abomination. We can't even dabble with the occult.
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So it requires spiritual warfare to fight back against this, but notice in verse 19 as we follow, the human resistance that comes is also demonic.
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These slave owners who were treating this girl as their property, they were demonic too, and what they do is inspired by the devil.
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It's human in the sense that the opposition that's gonna come against Paul at this point is a human opposition, but there's no way you could have dealt with it with human strength.
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Let's read it. Verse 19 to 24, but when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they were using her for money.
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They were exploiting her, as people still do today, demonically. They seized
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Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers, and when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, these men are
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Jews, and they are disturbing our city. They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept the practice.
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The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates tore their garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods, and when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safe.
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Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.
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Have you ever been hurting, and someone came up to you, meaning well, intending well, and said to you,
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God will not give you more than you can bear? Have you heard that?
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Maybe you've said it, I've probably said it myself. You know what, that's not biblical truth.
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First Corinthians 10, it does say, God will not give you more temptation than you are able to bear, but will allow you to stand up under it so that you can be godly, but there are trials in this life that are often more than you can bear.
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I will say the opposite of what you might have been told. God will give you more than you can bear in this life.
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He will give you more than you can bear. In Second Corinthians chapter one, I think it's verses eight and nine,
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Paul says that there was a time when he despaired even of life itself.
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It was more than he could cope with, but God gave him that so that he would rely on the strength of God.
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Read that in Second Corinthians one, that he would rely on the God who is able to resurrect even the dead.
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There will come times in your life where the trial you are given is more than you can deal with.
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Imagine Job crushed by the weight of the circumstances of his life.
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If you say to Job at that moment, God will not give you more than you can bear, what would his response have been?
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I'm already broken. It's already more. I'm dead, I'm done, and he's scraping himself with a hot shirt, and his family is dead, and he is undone at the end of his rope.
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He has no strength left. He's dried up. He's headed to the grave. It's more than he can bear, but the
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God who will sometimes give you trials that are harder than what you are personally able to cope with is able, through the power of his
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Holy Spirit, to carry you, to strengthen you, to help you, and to keep you, and he will see you through.
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I know many of you are going through some hard things, but God is with you.
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If you believe in Jesus, if you know him, this is the case with Paul. It's more than he can bear, and there's a purpose.
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2 Corinthians 4, 17. These light and momentary afflictions are achieving for us an eternal way of life.
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None of your suffering, none of your pain is without purpose. God has a reason for everything that he allows to happen under the sun.
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Job talks about that. Chapter 42, verse two. God has a purpose in all of the pain that he allows us to go through, and so if we'll keep our eyes on Jesus Christ and not get bogged down in the mud of this life and the pain, if we will focus on Christ, get our mind on heavenly things, not on earthly things, we can be content in any situation.
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That famous verse that all of you know. Maybe when you were a basketball player, you wrote it on your shoe, like Steph Curry. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
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That verse is about contentment. Just prior to saying that, he said he knows what it is to have plenty, he knows what it is to be in one.
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I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Whether well -fed or hungry, living in plenty or living in one.
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So look at verse 25. This is what you do when you're hurting. Here's the answer.
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If you're hurting and you know you don't have the strength, it's right here. Look what Paul does. This is the highlight of the message, by the way, in the text.
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This inspires me. Verse 25, about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening.
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I just want to stop there and let that sink in. After being beaten, his clothes stripped off and beaten with rods, his response is to pray and to sin.
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I like what Mark Miller writes in the song Even If. He's the guy from I Can Only Imagine, that movie that came out.
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He says, it's easy to sing when there's nothing to bring me now, but what will
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I do? What is it? I'm so bad at song lyrics, I had to write it down.
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I can memorize Bible verses and everything, but whenever I try to do songs, I butcher every song.
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I'm totally ruining every song we were singing up here. But what will I say when
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I'm held to the flames like I am right now? The song is called
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Even If. It's easy to sing when there's nothing to bring me down, but what will I say when I'm held to the flames like I am right now?
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Picture Paul, beaten with rods, singing the doxology.
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Praise God from whom all blessings flow. He sings that, and as he does, he lifts his arm and every inch of his arm smarts with pain because the rods have smacked that bare flesh.
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His feet are fastened into stocks. Praise God, all creatures here below, as he straightens his body up, trying to stand, the stocks pull him down and hurt his ankles.
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Praise him above, ye heavenly hosts, and his neck smarts with pain as he looks his eyes to heaven to sing to his
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God. He's singing to the fog, sun, and Holy Ghost, and the prisoners are listening.
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See, this is powerful. Praise gives you that strength.
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He inhabits the praise of his people in the midst of your storm. I've seen some of you walk through storms that I can't imagine, and yet I see how you praise in the midst of it, and that inspires me.
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It also unleashes power for the gospel. I don't know how this works, but when you are content in suffering, it is like cultivating the ground, like tilling the soil so that the gospel seed will go into someone's life.
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People are watching us, and when they see that we are content in Christ, in Christ alone, and we are not concerned about moving up to the next biggest house, or getting that slightly better car, when our lives demonstrate godly contentment in the midst of suffering, people notice that.
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Notice how the prisoners see this happening in verse 25. The prisoners were listening, no doubt the guard as well.
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Verse 26 and following, you know this story. This is fun. Suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's bonds were unfastened.
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When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped, but Paul cried out with a loud voice, do not harm yourself, for we are all here, and the jailer called for lights.
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Those are not electric lights, by the way, that's soldiers rushing in with torches, and rushed in and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas, then he brought them out and said, sirs, what must
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I do to be saved? The next verse is a Bible memory verse, all you kids.
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We have some sixth graders that are in here for the first time, because they finished the gospel project and now they've aged into this group.
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When you're in Sunday school growing up, you learn Acts 16 31, and if you want to witness, you need to know this verse too, because it's a simple answer to a simple question, what must
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I do to be saved? The answer is, believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.
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You and your household. Sola fide, it's an implied repentance, because you're turning away from sin to believe in Christ, and you will be saved.
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Salvation, maybe you're new here and you don't know this. Salvation is a gift.
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God has given the gift of his son to die on a cross, to suffer terribly in the place of those who would believe in him.
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The earned righteousness, the active righteousness of Christ in all of his obedience, and his passive obedience in allowing himself to be killed on a cross, though he had the power to stop them, purchases for us the gift of eternal life.
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He didn't stay dead, but on the third day, Jesus rose from the dead. And this is what God requires of you, that you stop trusting in yourself, stop thinking that your religion is gonna help anything, that you're a good enough person, stop putting any hope or trust in anything at all but Christ alone.
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The analogy from the Old Testament is when Moses was with the people and they had fallen into idolatry,
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God released snakes into the midst of the assembly and anyone who was bit by a snake was gonna die.
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But mercifully, God told Moses to take a bronze snake and fasten it to a pole and raise that snake up.
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And any snake person, snake -bitten person, who is dying from the snake bite, if they would only look to the bronze snake, they would be healed.
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They didn't have to do anything, they didn't have to climb the pole, they didn't have to earn anything from God, they needed to look and be saved.
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There in that analogy, John 3 .14, we come to John 3 .15 and the most famous verse in the
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Bible, John 3 .16. Looking is an analogy for believing.
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Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Look with the eyes of your heart to Christ alone.
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He will forgive your sins. You will be set free. You will be healed of your spiritual sickness, the death that is in you because of sin.
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It's the good news of the gospel. Paul preaches it in a lot less words than I just did. Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.
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Let's get to that here in just a second. Verse 32 to 34, and they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house and he took them the same out of the night and washed their wounds and he was baptized at once, he and all his family.
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Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them and he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God.
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He rejoiced because there is nothing in this world that can compare to the joy that Christ offers you.
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There's a lot that screams for your attention. That's what advertisers do on TV. They try to show you things that will make you not content with what you have.
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But brother and sister, if you have Christ, if you've been saved, you believe in Jesus, you have the treasure already.
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Be content in him. Notice the promise was not only for the jailer but for his household as well.
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What does that mean? In Proverbs, we're told, raise a child in the way that he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
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That is less of a promise and more of a principle. It's not saying that no child of a believer will ever wander from the faith and be lost.
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We know that's not the case. Some do. But there is a principle revealed here in Scripture.
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It's a beautiful thing. In fact, I'll just share. Yesterday, I saw a beautiful thing. I saw a family gather together to celebrate the housewarming of one of their family members and the whole family together in a family room singing the doxology.
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Praise God from whom all blessings flow. It was a beautiful sound. I saw the same thing with the
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Perry's as they were up in upstate New York and their family came together by the lake and sang worship songs.
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When I was in Seattle last month for a funeral, my uncle Henry, the family gathered and almost probably 60 people all singing the doxology.
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It's a beautiful sound. The general principle is this.
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Households follow the lead of the house head. If a head of a household, the father, the jailer in this story will give his heart to the
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Lord, it's not a guarantee, but very often, families are changed by that.
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And you will see the opposite happen where for generations, families are going astray.
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So what would I say to those of you who haven't cried? It's only the
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Lord who opens the heart like he did for Lydia. You can't save your family member, but the
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God who saved you might well be pleased to bring a prodigal home.
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Has it been too long and you're beginning to lose hope? Why would you lose hope when you have the
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God of all the universe who is able to say, don't give up? Until you have been baptized and every one of your children and your extended family continue to hope and pray and believe that God is still able to open their hearts.
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Don't give up no matter how much time goes by. This life is a short thing. Eternity is forever.
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So the jailer trusted Christ and the family came. There's one last little bit of scripture that a lot of people don't know is even here because that's the exciting part.
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Now we just have this odd little ending, but when it was day, the magistrate sent the police saying, let those men go.
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And the jailer reported these words to Paul saying, the magistrates have said to let you go. Therefore come out now and go in peace.
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But Paul said to them, they have beaten us publicly, uncondemned men who are
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Roman citizens and have thrown us into prison. And do they now throw us out secretly?
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No, let them come themselves and take us out. The police reported these things to the magistrates and they were afraid when they heard that they were
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Roman citizens. So they came and apologized to them and they took them out and asked them to leave the city.
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So they went out of the prison and visited Lydia. And when they had seen the brothers, they encouraged them and departed.
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Very interesting. Paul had a certain privilege.
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And there are many categories of privilege in this life. Every good and perfect gift comes from the father of life who does not change like shifting shadows.
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I wanna tell you this, whatever privilege you have, welcome it as a gift from God and use it as a gift to others.
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Paul recognized he was a Roman citizen and he could have easily just departed when he was let out of the prison.
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He could have just gone when they say you can go now, go on, he could have ran. But here's what he was thinking, no, no, I am going to use this privilege as a
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Roman citizen to bless others. He wasn't apologizing for it.
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He thought this came from God for a reason and here's what the reason was. So that if he would use that privilege and force them to publicly remove him and apologize, things would be a lot easier for the church when he leaves it behind.
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There's much less likelihood now that they're going to publicly arrest someone or beat them for preaching the gospel.
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Paul didn't do this because he was so prideful he wanted to be vindicated. He was content with Christ.
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He used this opportunity for the sake of others. You see what he did there?
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He forced them to bring him out so that life would be easier for the others going forward.
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And so that's how I want to close. To wrap this whole thing together. Sometimes life is smooth sailing.
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Whatever gifts or privileges, whatever good things that you have in this life, every good gift comes from God.
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Be content with what you've been given. Recognize that anything that you have is a tool for the gospel and put it to use for the gospel.
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Put it to use. That's the easy part. The hard part is when the hard times come.
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When you're persecuted unjustly, can you then look to Christ and in the midst of that begin to sing the doxology?
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There's the practical aspect. Learn the doxology and sing praise to God in the midst of every circumstance.
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I'm gonna ask the worship team to come up. You know what, let's do this. Mark, could you just lead us because you don't want me to do that.
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I know where you're going. Why don't we just close this word of prayer by singing the doxology. Go right there. Praise God from whom all.